CDA and media studies

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Critical analysis of discourse and of the media: challenges and shortcomings Pedro Santander Molina a a School of Journalism, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Viña del Mar, Chile Online Publication Date: 01 August 2009

To cite this Article Molina, Pedro Santander(2009)'Critical analysis of discourse and of the media: challenges and

shortcomings',Critical Discourse Studies,6:3,185 — 198 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17405900902974878 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405900902974878

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Critical Discourse Studies Vol. 6, No. 3, August 2009, 185 –198

Critical analysis of discourse and of the media: challenges and shortcomings Pedro Santander Molina School of Journalism, Pontificia Universidad Cato´lica de Valparaı´so, Lusitania 68, Vin˜a del Mar, Chile The main objective of this paper is to show what we consider to be weaknesses and shortcomings in discourse analysis, in general, and critical discourse analysis, in particular, when journalistic articles are analysed but omit or overlook intermediate levels of analysis and medium-range theories guiding data interpretation. For this purpose, this paper presents a theoretical and methodological discussion including analysis cases where such errors have been detected.

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Keywords: media discourse; critical discourse analysis; communicative situation

The problem Any attempt to carry out discourse analysis (DA) or critical discourse analysis (CDA) must be based on two basic supositions: (1) accepting the opacity of language; (2) making a scientific attempt to go ‘beyond the text’.

Language opacity and contents as simulacrum The first supposition involves a part that is evident: if language were not opaque but transparent, what would the point be of carrying out an analysis? However, there is a second part that does not appear so clearly to us: why is it opaque? Since, in order to explain such opacity we must resort to – since they play a fundamental role – elements of the extra-linguistic world, such as social structure, context, taboos, interpretation, previous knowledge, etc., a discourse analysis – critical or not – that intends to link language with the outside (Baumann, 2002) must take those elements into consideration.

However, the opacity problem also sets forth challenges that go in the opposite direction and makes reference to a problem of text contents, a problem that, it seems to me, is crucial and must be considered, so that any type of DA – let alone CDA – may be differentiated from textual linguistics (TL), even before establishing a problematic and a link with notions such as social structure or context.

Both DA and CDA must admit that a text’s contents may, under certain circumstances, be a deceitful, even an irrelevant, data. This consideration is particularly important to CDA since DA may not have a text’s contents as its focus; DA can, for instance, centre either on persuasion or politeness strategies, but CDA cannot evade contents, considering that its followers and founders manifest that their vital interest is oriented toward certain texts which they consider a priori to be discriminatory and the contents of which exercise abuse of power and discursively reproduce social injustice. For this same reason, it is worthwhile to analyse the problem of the importance of contents rather than to deify it beforehand.

Email: pedro.santander@ucv.cl

ISSN 1740-5904 print/ISSN 1740-5912 online # 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17405900902974878 http://www.informaworld.com

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The linguist Deborah Tannen (1996), for example, demonstrates in her researches on the relationship between gender and the use of language in face-to-face interactions how identical linguistic means are used for completely different purposes (solidarity vs domination). The author states that the fact of not acknowledging this potential ambiguity of linguistic strategies to mark both power and solidarity in dialogue interaction ‘has been detrimental to research on language and gender’ (Tannen, 1996, p. 41). The source of domination cannot, without further consideration, be located in the linguistic strategies used by speakers of different genders, reduced to the form, a conceptual and methodological error to which we are often witnesses in CDA works.

Another linguist, Scollon (2003), warns about the irrelevance that the contents of journalistic chronicles, used as a corpus to approach certain social problems, may represent, considering the distance existing between what the media state, for example, about AIDS and drug consumption, and the reality of AIDS patients’ or consumers’ actions.

In line with the communication media, critical tradition warns us that, at least according to the guidelines of the Frankfurt School, the contents of the media’s message may be a secondary data. This school demonstrates that the media’s contents vary little when it comes to certain prototypes and stereotypes that are incessantly repeated in the discourses of capitalist societies.

In this sense, for those who study the cultural industry, it would not be surprising at all – rather evident and entirely expected – that a considerable number of CDA works should over and over again discover the presence of racism or sexism in the discourse of Latin America’s media, the owners of which belong to the white bourgeois minority. Horkheimer and Adorno (1969, p. 186), without the need for a linguistic analysis but with a theoretical one, used to call it the ‘deceitful substitution of the individual by the stereotype’. From this view, it is not surprising that we should detect European and Latin-American journalists using similar linguistic strategies when they make racist or sexist representations in the media, as illustrated by Bolı´var (2000). That would rather be proving what was expected, since the cultural industry does not escape capital laws and accounts for them ideologically and discursively, either south or north.

Another problem which text contents face in the media, particularly in television, is the prevalence of the discourse genre. Through its permits and prohibitions (which are not only linguistic), a type of language that causes discourse genres to have primacy over contents has been positively established. According to Horkheimer and Adorno (1969, p. 151), ‘all genres cyclically return as invariable entities’. Research on media discourse shows that new genres have been ineffectively and slowly incorporated into television and that, once a genre becomes consolidated (such as soap operas, reality shows, talk shows, reports, video clips, etc.), contents become repetitive and secondary.

For instance, we often come across news broadcasts on different TV channels, by different journalists, whose texts are very similar. Our own research (Santander, 2003, 2004) has demonstrated the similitude shown in Chilean journalistic texts, not only in their contents but also in their syntactical structures and in the use of images. An event is frequently represented as news by various TV newscasts that compete for audience and commercial spots in a very similar fashion. The reason for this phenomenon is not to be found in the text. The news transcription and its later linguistic analysis do not give the basic answers that could explain why different journalists, working for competing TV channels and without beforehand agreeing to do so, produce such similar representations and interpretations, so that they coincide in the source of the interviews, the use of direct and indirect quotes, lexical repetitions, macropropositions and even syntactical and argumentative structures. The explanation for the above has to be found outside the grammatical and textual categories and must resort to conceptual categories, such as structural affinity, which has been historically built up between institutions

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with social power and news rooms, the informative subsidies, which agents from various social fields provide to journalists, the values of news under the liberal view, etc.

To the above we may add a last point which means a significant challenge to the linguistic analysis of the media: often the informative identity of a media, particularly the written press, is provided by its informative omissions, i.e. by what is not informed and kept in silence – rather than by what is published.

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Scientifically going beyond the text The second assumption mentioned above (to make a scientific attempt to go beyond the text) also entails no minor challenges because, on the one hand, we linguists are faced with a long and productive tradition anchored in the study of the sentence that operates as a centripetal force on the study of language. On the other hand, since text linguistics is the most serious and scientific attempt to go beyond the limits of the sentence, DA and CDA must necessarily include different objectives and objects of study to differentiate themselves from TL, in this sense, to theoretically and methodologically account for linguistic elements that, in a sort of analysis unit, affect the entire text; for example, the so-called discourse markers (Portole´s, 1998) are insufficient to assert that DA is being carried out, because that is clearly the objective and the achievement of TL. The objective and object of study of both DA and CDA are different in that they are necessarily linked to the discourse – society relationship. This point does not imply confusion of the notion of text with the notion of discourse, nor belief that discourse is equivalent to a chain of texts.

TL, especially in the German tradition, has known how to creatively and scientifically react to the challenge of going beyond the sentence, thus demonstrating that the text is a qualitatively different communicative unit of the sentence and that it is not its grammaticality but its textuality that makes a text be considered as such. In this task, TL comes near to the textual margins and surroundings, but decides to keep within the same, so that all steps taken that imply the risk of going out to the extra-linguistic world remain anchored in the text, for example when it is stated that, concerning the relationship between the micro-level of cohesion and the macrolevel of coherence, not only are we facing a set of grammatically and semantically interconnected sentences, but they are updated (reified) by the interlocutors, i.e. by elements outside the text, implying, moreover, that one single text can be open to more than one interpretation (de Beaugrande & Dressler, 1997; Brown & Yule, 1983). In other words, textual coherence is not only a quality of the texts themselves, but it is also related to what occurs outside the texts; therefore, it is at the same time a quality of the interpretations. In this sense, text is conceived as having a cognitive construction, articulated by directed or activated inferences due to textual signals.

Challenges of DA and CDA According to the above, we may state that DA and CDA face the following challenges: (1) Accepting the relativity of the linguistic data – as considered above, a text’s contents can at times be confusing (identical linguistic strategies for opposing purposes), secondary (genre prevails over contents) or irrelevant (when omissions are more important than the contents or when language serves the function of masking reality).

(2) The linguistic aspect is not guaranteed only by providing the method with a scientific character – this point emerges as a consequence of the above. Let us remember that one of the problems and challenges faced by TL when it was first proposed to surpass the sentence’s limits was not only the suspicion and the weight of quite a tradition

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which, as Benveniste (1971) believed, stated the sentence to be the highest unit of linguistic analysis, but also the challenge of knowing how to apply the scientific method, already assumed and incorporated by modern linguistics, as from Saussure, to this new level. In view of the relativity of the linguistic data we are proposing, it is now very difficult to determine at which level the discourse analysis is to be anchored (in the text itself, in the communicative situation, in social practice?). What seems to be evident is that the grammatical level by itself is not the sufficient and only guarantee for this undertaking. In this sense, and contrary to what the major tendencies have observed in AD and CDA, the analysis cannot be reduced merely to the contents of the text and, for this reason, the grammatical analysis per se may be insufficient and can even lead to misinterpretations and erroneous conclusions if, based exclusively on the latter, DA and CDA are to be carried out, as we shall observe below.

What has been stated so far does not intend to sustain that linguistic analysis is not necessary in DA or CDA; evidently, this is not the objective – rather, the aim is to present the limits of the problem and the challenges that should be taken into consideration. There are types of analysis in which not only can the strictly linguistic view not be disregarded, but the whole sense of the analysis depends on same. However, in DA, and all the more so in CDA, this is not always the case, since the object of its study establishes those restrictions, because the relationship between the social and the discursive views is at the core of its concerns.

The communicative situation What is beyond the text has received various denominations in social sciences and hermeneutics: context, social structure, situation, register, the outside, etc. For the purposes of this work, we shall use and analyse the problems of the communicative situation notion, which includes extra-linguistic aspects in different dimensions. This is the intermediate instance between the text and the historical – social situation. Fairclough (1992, 1997) calls it discursive practice, but I prefer communicative situation because the notion of situation can be considered intermediate between text and social context; in turn, ‘communicative’ refers to elements which, not being linguistic, keep some closeness to these elements, since they are related to routines and practices of production, circulation and consumption of signs.

To face the above-mentioned problems and challenges, I believe it is essential to make efforts to link the linguistic analysis level with an intermediate analysis level, such as the one we are mentioning herein. The first analysis level is descriptive, text-bound and works with the elements of the surface structure. It feeds on grammar and methods of analysis provided by currents such as critical linguistics (Fowler, Hodge, Kress & Trew, 1983; Hodge & Kress, 1993; Fowler, 1996) as well as systemic –functional grammar (Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Hasan, 1990), etc.

The second level is linked to the communicative situation in which the text is inserted, and is primarily interpretative. Results observed and obtained from the first instance are interpreted in the light of medium-range theories to which one resorts, depending on the specific problem under study (media, gender, power, etc.).

Theories that account for the relationship between text and the situation surrounding same and, often, conditioning it, are required here. Diverse authors have advised about this. Billing (2008, p. 791), for instance, states that ‘typically discourse analysts, including critical analysts, examine the discursive and linguistics features of given texts, rather than examining the process of producing and consuming texts’. Also Fairclough (2008, p. 817) insists upon the need of connecting the analytical levels, since not doing so causes that ‘we often short-circuit the connection

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between linguistic features of text and social-historical processes’. In this sense, Bourdieu (2000), for instance, uses the notion of field and employs it as an intermediate and mediating instance between text and context. What we avoid with this theoretical – methodological option is to operate as if the relation between discourse and society were direct and not mediated, a presupposition that may cause the interpretation not to definitively consider historical, social factors when performing the internal reading and interpretation (exegesis) of the linguistic corpus. This is what Bourdieu (2000) justly calls ‘short-circuit error’, which supposes setting up a direct relation between text and context. In the Latin American domain, Barbero (2003) proposes the theoretical and analytical term ‘mediation’ in order to move from the textual structure to the social structure and vice-versa; not to do so is not to consider the live reading of persons and social movements. In a similar direction, Forna¨s (2008, p. 900) mentions ‘the materialization of mediation as a way of widening the scope of understanding how meaning is constructed in communicative practices’.

We shall hereafter illustrate some cases that demonstrate that, if we base and anchor the discourse analysis only on the linguistic level, disregarding the information provided by the communicative situation, this may lead to making erroneous inferences and hypotheses. We shall give examples where one of the three instances on the intermediate level (production, circulation, consumption) was not sufficiently considered when the analysis was carried out. We also state that we wish to illustrate cases; therefore, the view is intense rather than extensive or generalizing. For instance, rather than CDA in general, this time we draw our attention to the social – cognitive oriented CDA, in the lines of Teun van Dijk, a Dutch researcher who has a strong influence over CDA practised in Latin America.

Production conditions and the function of text structures Dutch linguist T. van Dijk is a common reference for researchers performing CDA, at least in Latin America. Certainly, this author has done a series of interesting research regarding the language used by the written press regarding issues of power, racism and discourse processing (see, amongst others, Van Dijk, 1990, 1995, 1996a, 1997). With his contribution, a series of linguistic categories, such as local coherence, semantic macrostructure, propositions, macropropositions and superstructure, began to be applied in the analysis of journalistic texts. Those categories, however, are often applied in an acritical way, without considering the intermediate instances to which we have formerly referred, and how such instances affect texts.

By observing CDA proposals, we can see a constant concern on the part of many media discourse analysts for discovering and describing the semantic macrostructures of journalistic texts.

Upon referring to the above, Van Dijk (1990), in this respect, asserts that the topic is summarized in the headlines and that these, in turn, would fulfil the function of summarizing. Van Dijk applies three macro-rules of semantic transformation or mapping (suppression, generalization and substitution or construction) to the texts in question. It is an analysis that, from a microlevel, starts from what he calls propositions of the different sentences that make up the text.

To these the macro-rules are applied, thus transforming the local semantic information in such a way that, once all propositions are known, macro-propositions can be extracted. These macro-propositions must have a hierarchical organization, so that each sequence can be subsumed under another, higher one, which leads to the highest, which constitutes the central topic of the text. Moreover, the topic need not be literally present in the text but the analyst can interpret it from this highest macro-structure.

The above faces us with two problems.

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Uncertainty regarding the analysis model Although the rules of semantic transformation – suppression, generalization and substitution – are specified, the rules for suppressing, generalizing and substituting are not specified, so that we ignore how the process occurs and the analysis cannot guarantee an agreement in the transformation operations. As far as this weakness is concerned, Raiter (2002) illustrates, for example, how van Dijk (2003) entirely suppresses, in an analysis proposal, a text’s initial paragraph which, from the perspective of the ideological analysis, contains the most relevant information.

However, since the methodological considerations that should guide the process of suppression are not explained, the reasons for that elimination are not made clear.

Speaking of rules and not indicating how to apply them analytically does not guarantee higher degrees of intersubjective agreements among analysts, since the method and conclusions are left open to multiple interpretations. For instance, when a text’s central topic is not looked for in a literal proposition but in a logical – semantic one and when a logical – intuitive reduction is suggested in search of larger units, the validity of the method of analysis still resides, to a great extent, in the analyst’s talent and expertise and in the reliance placed on him/her. This is just what must be avoided if DA and CDA are to be endowed with scientific character.

In such situations, it is very easy to fall into a kind of circular analysis, since we give priority to the analysis of what interests us in a text, over and above the analysis of use of language.

When this occurs, texts are adapted to hypotheses, due to the lassitude of the analytical techniques and the methodological problem of searching in the text for a specific item.

Non-scientific generalizations Another problem lies in the generalizations about the analyses. Because the level of grammatical analysis has proved to be rich in generalizations and has made linguistics into a modern science, the temptation to do the same by moving from the notion of text to that of discourse is understandable, but the difficulty is immensely greater. Van Dijk (1990), for example, erroneously generalizes when, upon applying the macro-rules to journalistic texts, he sustains that headlines fulfil the function of summarizing. True, that may occur, but it is also true that it may not.

Were the communicative situations surrounding journalistic texts duly considered, specifically, the way in which the production conditions typical of the journalistic field affect the texts, then the above would be avoided. We would observe that, for example, the demands on macro-structures show different and particular behaviours in journalistic discourse, as compared with others. Various elements – of both linguistic and non-linguistic nature – bear on the greater or lesser presence and placement of global topics in text structures, such as the headline, the title or the epigraph. Thus, in the informative genre, i.e. the genre directly linked to news, there really exists a tendency to summarize the news into headlines, but in the written press, this tendency depends heavily on the available space and on the importance assigned to the news, so that it can be asserted that it is co-relational: the less the space for the news, the greater the function of the title as summary and the greater the attachment to the semantic transformation rules; but by having a greater availability of space (e.g. a front page headline), the communicative function of captivating the reader before the semantic projection begins to prevail. In the case of TV news, there is no equivalent to the title, and the text’s semantic macro-structure is almost always placed in the first paragraph of the news, which is read by the newscasters before the cameras.

The relationship between macro-structure and press headline is, therefore, very dynamic and non-univocal. The various formats, the availability of space, the emphasis placed on the event and the genre have, among others, some influence as well. In the genre of opinion and interpretation, for example, a more literary style prevails, not the factual style found in the informative

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genre, which also affects the title; furthermore, opinion columns or editorials are often entitled with what Pardo (1986, 1996) calls textual rheme, which is frequently to be found at the end of the text and which, even though it is a macro-structure, does not represent a global topic but a sort of textual closing.

As may be noted, knowing the textual dynamics is not enough to make generalizations or discourse hypotheses; the communicative situation framing the same must also be considered, since it affects the text. The manner in which oral narrations, novels or journalistic texts are produced is very different. While oral narration, as a form, presupposes a basic community of values relating the narrator to the audience in shared contexts, the novelistic narration is an author’s intimate activity, isolated from his/her public, and lacking the phatic guarantee, journalistic articles are produced through collective routines by a team playing various roles in spatial and temporal contexts, almost always separated from their interlocutors.

Furthermore, it is advisable to consider – according to an entire line of media research – the media’s present profit-oriented trend in capitalist societies and the resulting commercial imperative (Hackett, 1995) under which they operate. This causes the function of captivating the audience’s attention, which the media sell to the publicists, to be really at stake. Evidently, headlines play an essential role in this respect.

Conditions of circulation and the limits of the grammatical level Not only production conditions but also circumstances under which signs circulate affect texts, and such circumstances must be considered in the analysis. To disregard these instances in the communicative process may lead to erroneous conclusions, no matter how correct the grammatical analysis may be.

The way in which signs circulate varies significantly, according to the social field in which circulation occurs. The manner texts circulate in a classroom, in a doctor’s office, in the colloquial face-to-face interaction or in the media, is very different. In the case of the media discourse, there is always a structured rupture of contexts between the production of signs and their reception. Unlike what occurs in face-to-face communication, in media communication the context of production is always separated from the context of reception, and the flow of messages circulates preferably in one single direction, establishing what Thompson (1998) calls structural asymmetry of the communicative process.1 Let us observe the following example. In an article by the well-known Argentinean linguist Martı´n Mene´ndez (2003) entitled ‘Grama´tica y Discurso: Las relaciones evidentes’ and where it is established that any discourse analysis is conditioned by a grammatical theory, a direct quote from the then Cardinal Ratzinger is analysed. In his article, Mene´ndez suggests the following (emphasis in bold type): Propondre´, por u´ltimo, un fragmento de una nota sobre la salud del Papa aparecida en La Nacio´n el 1 de septiembre de 2003 y firmada por Elizabetta Pique. Dice el fragmento: (. . .) En el mismo artı´culo de Bunte, el cardenal Ratzinger, de 76 an˜os, no excluyo´ que el pro´ximo Papa pueda venir del continente africano, ‘aunque no creo que pueda suceder, porque el nu´mero de cardenales blancos es muy superior’, sostuvo. Y ante una pregunta sobre las voces que lo indican a e´l como eventual ‘papabile’, contesto´:’Dios mı´o, no fui creado para esto’.

Next, Mene´ndez analyses the direct quote grammatically, emphasizing, among other aspects, the following: Tenemos, en principio, dos opciones disponibles: – no creo que suceda [. grado de probabilidad] – no creo que pueda suceder [, grado de probabilidad]

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Al elegir la menos probable, se la justifica a partir de un argumento que afirma que el nu´mero de cardenales blancos es muy superior.

La cla´usula relacional es atributiva. La superioridad es un atributo del nu´mero e intensifica esa atribucio´n. Por otra parte, la construccio´n muy superior elide estrate´gicamente el elemento comparado que se repone a partir de una relacio´n cohesiva de colocacio´n que esta´ fuera de la cita textual del cardenal Ratzinger y que alude concretamente al ‘continente africano’. (. . .)

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No deja de llamar la atencio´n la utilizacio´n del adjetivo ‘superior’ en este contexto ya que la oposicio´n paradigma´tica en la que participa es ‘inferior’ cuando podrı´a haberse optado por ‘mayor’ y ‘menor’.2

Nevertheless, in this analysis there is a crucial element which is not considered and which is related to the conditions of circulation: the direct, analysed quote which appeared in the Argentinean newspaper La Nacio´n has been published in at least two different languages and, very likely, in three. If we read carefully, we will see that the quote was taken from Bunte Magazine, a weekly German magazine. Therefore, we can assert that what Ratzinger manifested had previously been expressed in that language. If, moreover, we consider that Ratzinger’s permanent residence is Italy, it is possible (although this cannot be assured with the same certainty as the above) that he was interviewed in Italy, either by the magazine journalist or by an agency, and this makes Italian become involved as a third language.

What is surprising here is that the grammatical level – supposed to be the most formal – leads to speculation: which German expression did Ratzinger really use, that was later translated as superior? Viel ho¨her, viel gro¨sser or simply mehr? Did he really use a qualifying adjective such as superior, with all the connotations it might imply or did he use a comparative adjective? Did he use an absolute superlative or a comparative adverb? Whatever the case might be and because we do not know, we cannot assert anything at all about the paradigmatic oppositions.

Neither is a syntagmatic contrast based on the greater or lesser degrees of probability viable, since we do not know whether he actually used the subjunctive or the indicative mood; furthermore, in German either of the two requires the use of an auxiliary in a relative clause.

Besides, if we consider the editing process which journalistic texts – and especially interviews – always undergo, we cannot know who is responsible for the omission of the nominal phrase African continent; it may have been Ratzinger, as Mene´ndez assures, or the journalist, in some instance of the textual production.

It is then surprising and interesting that, in situations like these, the interpretative level associated with the communicative situation in which the text is framed should provide us with more certainties than the descriptive or the formal one. The limits of the grammatical analysis are shown when the information provided by the conditions of circulation is not taken into consideration.

Lastly, it is worthwhile to make two additional comments, from both a historical and a linguistic point of view. On the one hand, beyond modal differences, historical considerations are sufficient to know that a black man will probably not be Pope, which causes a critical analysis such as this to lose its political, racial and symbolic dimension upon centring itself only on the text. On the other hand, it can be argued that, beyond syntagmatic modal oppositions, the text from the Argentinean newspaper La Nacio´n states what it states and the phrase that is likely to happen has undoubtedly been written and is to be so read. This is true; the problem arises when the translated grammatical form is referred to the addresser’s intention (in this example to Ratzinger) and, in that case, I believe it is advisable to make a distinction between the speaker’s intention and what could be called, following the structuralist tradition, effects of reading.

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Conditions of reception and the text’s surroundings We have previously stated the need to avoid a direct relation between text and context, and to consider mediation in the light of middle range theories. In this sense, frequently the cognitive flow of CDA seems to perform media analysis, on the basis of the fact that those who control the media’s textual production also control their readers’ thoughts. However, the effect of the communication media upon their audience, i.e. finding out how the contents which the media put in to circulation affect the belief or the attitude of persons, represents the most slippery and risky field of the media studies.

Many authors have warned against making linear inferences about the effect of semiotic products. Voloshinov (1993) referred to the social orientation of the statement and the real and potential audience, in respect of that problem; Vero´n (1993) also makes the topic problematic when he refers to the maladjustments to communication processes, and this leads him to make the distinction between grammars of production and of recognition. Why, then, does CDA constantly fall into what Bourdieu calls short-circuit error (Bourdieu, 2000), which supposes a direct relationship between text and context? For instance, when it supposes that acceding to and controlling the discourse of the media is equivalent to cognitively acceding to and controlling readers mind?

I tend to think that believing in this assumption about the effects of the text in such an acritical way has to do, firstly, with a structuralist tradition which strongly consolidated primacy of the text. Secondly, it has to do with not giving sufficient consideration to the contribution of communication theory to the analysis of media, either in its functionalist or in its critical tendencies. Theoretical contributions made by both sociology and psychology have been devoted to studying the effects as from the 1920s onwards, and should be considered in the linguistic analyses of the media. It is a field of study that, further to being complex, is very dynamic and in which there has been a transition between an interest in the short-term effects and the long-term effects; from the direct ones to the accumulative ones; from the question ‘what do the media do to people?’ to ‘what do people do with the media?’; from theories that appeal to weak audiences to others that notice the re-semantization and allegation strategies of audiences.

Thirdly, I believe that the (acritical) influence of van Dijk over a large number of CDA practitioners,3 especially in Latin America, leads to neglect of the complexity of the problem.

Throughout his work, he justifies to a great extent the importance of the linguistic analysis of the media under the following assumption: Los actores sociales con poder, adema´s de controlar la accio´n comunicativa, hacen lo propio con el pensamiento de sus receptores (van Dijk, 1997, p. 21). [Social agents with power, apart from controlling the communicative situation, do the same with their recipients’ thinking.]

La mayor parte de nuestro conocimiento social y polı´tico, ası´ como de nuestras creencias sobre el mundo, emanan de las decenas de informaciones que leemos o escuchamos a diario en la prensa (van Dijk, 1997, p. 29). [Most of our social and political knowledge as well as our tenets of the world emerge from dozens of pieces of information that we read or listen to in the daily press.]

Beyond the control of contents or style, thus, the speakers may also control audience (van Dijk, 1996a).

Newspaper editorials play a role in the formation and change of public opinion (van Dijk, 1996b).

As may be observed, these assertions suppose weak and cognitively vulnerable audiences and very powerful media in the shaping of beliefs and attitudes.

Fourthly, I believe that the effect issue is appropriate for CDA followers with a good linguistic instruction, but with deficits in the social and communication theories, when making hasty inferences about the effect of texts, influenced by the idea that language has both a generative capacity (Echeverrı´a, 2003) and a performative one (Austin, 1975) and, in this sense, it helps to build social reality. Such considerations, coming from the philosophy of language, from

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the constructivist paradigm and referring us to speech acts, are based on speech situations that are quite formal and prefigured in their contexts (baptism, marriages, promises, dialogue, etc.); it has to do with typical moments of micro-level emissions, instances far from the present structured social conditions in which media interaction occurs. Thus, the theory of speech acts and the resulting performative capacity of certain linguistic emissions are extrapolated to journalistic texts, attributing to the latter’s messages an untested constitutive nature and a perlocutionary force upon the social issue.

Fifthly, as Thompson (1998) warns us, for linguists it is obviously tempting to focus on the symbolic contents and messages of the media, but this incurs in the risk of thinking that studying the media is equivalent to analysing the signical objects of its language. On one hand, we thus confuse media texts with the object of study (the media) and, on the other, the textual analysis defines its object of study erroneously as a homogeneous object, where the concepts of producer and audience are made into formulations and discursive strategies.

For all the above-stated reasons, it may be affirmed that it is not sufficient that assertions about the effect of the media hold textual analysis as the only element of support. Besides, it is contradictory, since, if CDA defines discourse as a social practice, it cannot, in turn, treat the notion of discourse exclusively as a semiotic object. Let us recall that the definition of discourse as a social practice places the discursive phenomenon outside the textual limits and makes it participate in dialectically conforming social events and structures. Hence, one thing is to make a linguistic description of a text and another is to apply that description to the logical turn of discourse which implies opening the surroundings of such a text. Because these considerations are overlooked, semiotic hypotheses are often confused with social hypotheses; for instance, when it is sustained that semiotic violence causes social violence, an assertion made during various forums, but never proved.

The reception of texts: methodological considerations Finally, we wish to make some observations about the methodological difficulties arising from the moment we wish to measure the effect of media texts on audiences. A great deal of audience studies and linguistic analysis of press texts – for instance, those made in the context of political campaigns – attempt to measure the media’s short-term influence, despite the theoretical warning that the influence of media on people is essentially cumulative and long-term. In this sense, three or four weeks is too brief a period to establish and formulate generalizations. On the contrary, studies that, being aware of the cumulative impact, attempt to measure the longterm effect, meet with a crucial problem in the research of effects: how to distinguish between the influence of the media discourse and the influence of other factors, i.e. how to isolate variables. It might seem that, the greater the observation time-curve, the scarcer the media’s influence would be; consequently, the only effective way of isolating this additional contextual influence is by means of experimental methods, thus disregarding the natural contexts of appropriation and re-semantization of messages on the part of readers and TV viewers.

To the above is added the difficulty of knowing how many recipients of traditional media perform a critical and oppositional reading of those texts, since it depends significantly on the access to alternative media, a dynamic which is outside the terms of reference of audience studies (Curran, 2002), which generally investigate traditional media.

History and texts Undoubtedly, on the one hand, together with the media’s concentration of property, in Latin America as well as a large part of the western world, what we may call as a discursive

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closure has been produced, in the domains of production and circulation. In turn, it seems that at times and regarding certain subjects, there appear to be more hegemonic interpretations, partly due to the action of the media. However, if the effect on the audience’s mental models were as linear as CDA’s cognitive current sustains and depended so much on the media’s content, the situation in Latin America would be different due to the growing concentration of media property in the hands of oligopolies.

However, the observation of the political and social processes that presently are taking place in our American continent are a good reference to make us ask ourselves whether the media discourses really have such a strong influence over the audience’s mental models.

Yet stark facts show us the opposite: even though the economic right wing of our country is the owner of the general reference media, which attempts to discursively build what Gomis (1997) calls the shared social present, the media’s agenda has not become the social agenda (going against one of the basic principles of the Agenda Setting Theory) and the public discourse that circulates hegemonically has not been able to form the desired political settings, nor has it demonstrated constitutive or performing capacity at a macro-social level. The triumphs of Hugo Cha´vez, Lula, Rafael Correa and Evo Morales in South America are clear examples of the limits of the effect of media discourse upon the will of the population. In a context of long-standing and systematic media campaigns against those continental leaders on the part of the majority of the traditional media, the same, submitted to the popular scrutiny, have repeatedly obtained a solid majority.

In fact, history teaches and shows us that the traditional media have not been able to read the social telluric dynamics and did not foresee the emergence of the feminist movement, ecological movements or those advocating Africa’s or Latin America’s national liberation, Zapata followers or advocates of alter-globalization. And, despite the fact that these movements had little or no access to massive media – or a negative and stigmatized access – they developed and grew in the heart of social movements and played or play significant roles in changing power relations.

For this reason, we maintain that it is one thing to have a privileged access to the context of textual production – as is the case of the elites facing the media discourse – and an entirely different thing to believe that this strongly unidirectional flow of communication allows us to make linear inferences about the effect of texts on the audience.

Final reflections This paper attempted to demonstrate that it is necessary for discourse analyses to be different from the analyses performed in text linguistics and to show the fascinating complexities involving the fact of going beyond the text, wherefore we focussed on the intermediate level of the communicative situation that is part of the context. As was observed, human communication may undergo a systematic distortion, influenced by intermediate elements such as those described herein, a situation that becomes even more serious if macrosocial notions, such as power, class and social structure, are considered.

The focus was placed on the social-cognitive oriented CDA and on specific cases, not in order to generalize, but to illustrate concrete situations, where it is worthwhile to stop in order to generate meditation as well as theoretical and methodological discussion.

To all the above we would add two points which could be developed in another instance. If CDA wishes to become a discipline, it also faces the challenge of distinguishing itself from sociolinguistics, the aim of which, similarly, is to go beyond the description of the code form and reach deeper into the relationship between language and society (Lavandera, 1984). What makes them different? It seems to me that it is where each one places the emphasis. Whereas

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sociolinguistics begins with language focusing on the social, CDA intends to go from the social to the linguistic or, as Kress states, ‘Critical Discourse Analysis sees the linguistics as within the social’ (Kress, 1990, p. 87). The analysis of linguistic structures cannot, for the same reason, be the only element in CDA. Although linguistic knowledge is essential to a discourse theory, it is a mistake, as pointed out by Vero´n (1993), to believe that discursive problems can be accessed by projecting the linguistic knowledge onto social contexts or, as Foucault warned Derrida 30 years ago, ‘to textualize discourse practices and believe that there is nothing outside of the text and that therefore it is not necessary to seek anywhere else’ (Foucault, 1999).

In that same sense, to understand the need to start from the events and not from the text, since the events allow to pick up the necessary texts may be, for those who perform discourse studies in Latin America, an essential element to contribute with our own features to this area of knowledge. History shows us that social, political and discursive Latin American events are very distinctive, at times even symptomatic, with regard to the function of world politics. Let us recall, for instance, the decade of the sixties and the world influence exercised by revolutionary movements inspired by Cuban Castro in respect of this and other parts of the world, or the surprising appearance of neo-liberal populisms in the nineties (the so-called neo-populisms), or the unique continental response of Latin America to the capitalist globalization in the twenty-first century.

However, in spite of the richness of this rebellious reality of the Latin American context, our own theorizations in the domain of the discourse analysis are scarce. What we undoubtedly have achieved is to produce an important and abundant accumulation of empirical information, but the same has not transcended the descriptive level nor has it opened the door to new theoretical interpretations, since, while our objects of analysis are located in the south, our conceptual frames pre-eminently come from the north.

As far as media discourse is concerned, it may be maintained that undoubtedly and just as CDA considers, they are subject to permanent and significant pressures exercised upon them by power structures; likewise, it is evident that they partake in the ideological struggle by, for example, hiding or masking reality, as is the case of the US media coverage of the Twin Towers or the Iraq invasion. However, the contribution and participation of the media in the articulation of power relations is still kept quite opaque, and discourse studies can help to reduce that opacity because the symbolic dimension, the circulation of signs, is an irreducible media phenomenon. Without signs, there is no media, but the study of signs does not account for the entire phenomenon.

Notes on contributor Pedro Santander Molina is a journalist as well as Doctor in Linguistics. His lines of research are focused on discourse analysis, specifically in respect of the media. He currently works as professor at the School of Journalism, Pontificia Universidad Cato´lica de Valparaı´so, Chile, where he is in charge of lectures on Language Theory and Discourse Analysis.

Notes 1. This is particularly valid for traditional media (written press, radio and television), whereas the internet seems to count on an alteration potential, in this sense, at least as far as the asymmetrical flow is concerned; blogs are a good example of same.

2. We shall finally propose a fragment of a note on the Pope’s health which appeared in La Nacio´n 1 September 2003, and signed by Elizabetta Pique. The fragment reads: In the same Bunte article, Cardinal Ratzinger, 76, did not exclude the possibility that the Pope might come from the African continent, although he said that: I do not believe that this is

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likely to happen, because the number of white cardinals is quite superior’. And, answering a question on the voices indicating him as papabile, he said: ‘Oh God! I wasn’t created for that’.

We have, in principle, two options available: I do not believe that will happen [. degree of likelihood] I do not believe that this is likely to happen [, degree of likelihood] In choosing the less likely option, it is justified from the following claim: The number of white cardinals is quite superior.

The relational clause is attributive. Superiority is an attribute of number and enhances that attribution. Besides, the construction quite superior strategically elides the compared element that is replaced from a cohesive relationship, which is out of Cardinal Ratzinger’s textual quote and concretely alludes to the African continent (. . .).

The use of the adjective superior in this context also draws our attention, since the paradigmatic opposition in which it participates is inferior, when greater or fewer could have been other options.

3. This is, of course, not van Dijk’s fault.

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